First Bite

What’s eating Hannibal Lecter?

The new Thomas Harris novel goes by the title of “Hannibal Rising” (Delacorte; $27.95). This has the effect of making Dr. Hannibal Lecter sound like a soufflé, a fever chart, or a storm—all comparisons that the good doctor, who prides himself as an epicure and a force of nature, would be bound to welcome. This is his fourth outing in print. He made his blushing début in “Red Dragon” (1981), then returned to the fray in “The Silence of the Lambs” (1988) and “Hannibal” (1999). As the dates testify, there has been a decorous interval between appearances, as if Lecter, like any other star who understands the value of rarity, were keen to insure that his public should be neither glutted nor bored. Naturally, he himself never suffers from boredom, floating far above such vulgar impedimenta as ennui, and free to disport himself within his “memory palace.” This spacious and well-appointed dwelling is located, according to the opening sentence of “Hannibal Rising,” “in the darkness at the center of his mind.” Typical Lecter. The rest of us have to make do with a memory shed, or a mildewed memory cupboard filled with memory junk. He gets a palace.

Our hero began life, we learn from the new book, in prewar Lithuania. He lived in Lecter Castle, which has been the family seat of the Lecters since the time of Hannibal the Grim (1365-1428). That is a pleasantly morbid joke with which to start the book, but anybody who hopes that it will herald a feast of mirth from Thomas the Funny will turn the final page without a smile. We are on serious ground here, and one of the tasks of the novel is to see it hallowed, defiled, and then reconsecrated. There are images of a childhood Eden, in which Hannibal plays with his little sister, Mischa, but these are erased by the arrival of German troops, aided by a gang of collaborative local thugs. For three and a half years, the family—headed by Count Lecter, Hannibal’s father—survives in a hunting lodge in the woods, but at last the thugs catch up with them. Everybody dies except Hannibal, although we are led to believe that something in his soul, too, has perished, as a result of seeing Mischa killed and eaten. It remains possible, though unconfirmed, that he unwittingly drank hot soup made from her bones.

The rest of the story, for all its complications, is a plain tale of revenge. Young Hannibal is transferred to postwar France in the care of his uncle Robert, a painter who is married to a Japanese woman named Lady Murasaki. Hannibal impresses her with his flower arranging. “Ahhh. We would call that moribana, the slanting style,” she says. When the uncle dies, she is left not just a Lady but a widow: double the allure, for someone as choosy as Lecter. From here he becomes an exemplary medical student, noted as an anatomical draftsman; in the last pages, he is offered an internship at Johns Hopkins. In the intervening years, he keeps himself busy by tracking down and slaughtering as many of his sister’s killers as he can find. One has his head pulled off by a horse; another has the letter “M,” for Mischa, carved into his flesh; another, jostled by preserved cadavers, is drowned in formalin solution; and so on. There is also another victim, unconnected with events in Lithuania—a porky French butcher, whom Lecter decapitates for having insulted his aunt in the marketplace. As Lecter will announce to Clarice Starling, many years hence, “Discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.” The author adds, “It was as though committing murders had purged him of lesser rudeness.”

In short, Lecter is and always will be a snob. He is not, whatever his ambitions, a gentleman, partly because he is a homicidal maniac but also because no gentleman would dream of actually telling you how much he values courtesy. To proclaim one’s virtue, however humbly, is the prerogative of the Pharisee. (Humbert Humbert, another European refugee on a New World spree, has the same weakness.) The snobbery of Lecter is grounded in his being, to borrow a phrase from Jeeves, “somewhat acutely alive to the existence of class distinctions.” A useful sensitivity, not least when it comes to dealing with the somewhat acutely dead. Like a lily-bearing aesthete of the eighteen-nineties, Lecter reveres the innocent, the comely, and the delicate, reserving his distaste for bestial men—and it is always men. (The line that he addressed in “Hannibal” to the Florentine detective, “I’m giving serious thought to eating your wife,” immediately struck me as less of a promise than a taunt.) That is why the revelation, in the first chapter of “Hannibal Rising,” that his father was a count, and therefore that the serial shedder of blood has veins that run with truest blue, comes as such a viscous disappointment. There was something amusing in the sleek, aristocratic demeanor of Dr. Lecter as he stood, or languidly reclined, in his prison cell to receive Clarice Starling, and Harris’s decision to trace that back to a genuine aristocracy is both simplistic and dim. There we were, taking a naughty, unfashionable delight in Lecter’s desire to scorn the uneducated (“I forget your generation can’t read, Clarice”), and breathlessly following his plans to enslave them in his schemes, when all along he was dreaming of a real servant class, lost in the ancestral mist of his Lithuanian estates. I blame the Count:

I myself am of an old family, and to live in a new house would kill me. . . . We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may lie amongst the common dead.

That is the owner of Castle Dracula, of course, as reported by Bram Stoker, in 1897, but Dracula and Lecter père hail from roughly the same period, and, given the aroma of inbreeding that pervades European nobility, they might be second cousins. I certainly detect a glint of Stoker’s eternal throat-biter, with his “peculiarly sharp white teeth,” in his distant but no less ravening relation: “Dr. Lecter has small white teeth,” as we were first informed in “Red Dragon.” Redness, too, glows through the Lecter corpus as unfailingly as a sign outside a brothel. Obviously, there is the scarlet rush of gore (“A wet crunch and a pulsing arterial spray”), but more tranquil, though no less frightening, is the color of the villain’s knowing gaze: “Dr. Lecter’s eyes are maroon and they reflect the light in pinpoints of red.” Thus does Clarice peer into them, like an astronomer inspecting a dying sun, on her first trip to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but again we could be back in Transylvania. In Stoker’s words, “His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them.” Where are you supposed to look, when your host is having a hissy fit?

The failure of “Hannibal Rising,” which seems to me absolute, is easily explained. It stems from the author’s newfound conviction that Hannibal, too, can be easily explained. Until now, Dr. Lecter seemed destined to be one of the immortals, lounging in the pantheon with a copy of Dante and a case of Château Pétrus, and conversing lightly with his peers—Professor Moriarty, perhaps, who was also “a man of good birth and excellent education.” So said Sherlock Holmes, observing that the criminal tendencies of his enemy were “rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.” Yet Lecter’s place in the literature of nightmare is not altogether secure. From my constant and unhealthy rereading of the earlier books, I have learned that Lecter lives and breathes only when five essential conditions are fulfilled. “The Silence of the Lambs” meets all five; “Hannibal Rising,” none. The conditions are:

1. Lecter must be incarcerated.2. He must be in America.

3. He must be peripheral to the plot (the capture of another killer), however central he is to the atmosphere.

4. He must attract the professional interest of a woman.5. He must be as insoluble as Iago.

The doctor himself was famously insistent on this last point in “The Silence of the Lambs,” stating that “nothing happened to me, Officer Starling. I happened. You can’t reduce me to a set of influences.”

The new book is just such a reduction. Were it the kind of reduction that Lecter, a fine cook, prepares in “Hannibal” as a juniper-tinged sauce for his grilled tenderloin, it would slip down nicely. But all we get is influences, beginning with the loss of home and family, plus the implication that these were the making, or the warping, of Hannibal Lecter. If that were logically the case, then anyone who witnessed or endured savagery in the Second World War would be doomed to revisit its terrors on the peacetime world. Half of Europe, even now, would be dining off the other half. Hitherto, the champions of Lecter have ascribed to him a core of monstrosity, no more malleable than a diamond, and native to him alone; if so, it is brushed aside and squandered by the uncovering of his past. With “Hannibal Rising,” we watch the legend sink.

Why did Harris pursue this line of inquiry? He has written one great Lecter book, “The Silence of the Lambs,” and two lesser ones, so why produce a fourth that is not merely the weakest but that makes you wonder if the others were so gripping after all? There is a puff of grand delusion here, of the sort to which all thriller-writers are susceptible. Compare “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” an early novel by George V. Higgins, with the bulky solemnities of his later work; or, for that matter, “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” with more recent le Carré like “The Night Manager” or “The Constant Gardener.” At some point, each man started to hear that he was so much more than the master of a genre (as if that were an ignoble thing to be), and responded to such flattery by expanding his fiction beyond its confines, not realizing that what he felt as a restriction was in fact its natural shape. That is how a writer loses thrust and form, and how Thomas Harris went from this, a jailbreak in “The Silence of the Lambs”:

“Lieutenant, it looks like he’s got two six-shot .38s. We heard three rounds fired and the dump pouches on the gunbelts are still full, so he may just have nine left. Advise SWAT it’s +Ps jacketed hollowpoints. This guy favors the face.”

To this, a love duet from “Hannibal Rising”:

“I see you and the cricket sings in concert with my heart.”“My heart hops at the sight of you, who taught my heart to sing.”

What the hell is going on here? Where is the damn SWAT team when you need it? And will somebody tell me how the guy who favored the face—the adult Lecter, armed and on the loose—emerged from the schoolboy with the hopping heart, trading insect quips with Lady Murasaki? They are lifted by moonlight, apparently, “to a place above ghost-ridden earth, a place unhaunted, and being there together was enough.” Ahhh. We would call that moribund, the swollen style. Harris has developed aspirations to be a prose poet, not remembering that the jailbreak, with its brace of .38s, was already poetry in motion—hard, metallic, and perfectly timed. Lecter survived on his wits, and scared us out of ours. He kept leaping into the present tense, as if out of a darkened doorway (“Dr. Lecter’s eyes are maroon”), and, because we feared that he could be lurking anywhere, we assumed that he had come from nowhere. Now we know better, and the outcome couldn’t be worse. Hannibal the Unboreable, thanks to his overzealous creator, has dwindled to less of a monster and grown into more of a bore. He would kill me for saying so, but it’s the truth. ♦